The Celtics were fighting early on, but there wasn’t a lot going their way against the Pistons. Boston was working their tails off to manufacture shots and missing most of them. After one quarter, the Celtics were just 7-23 from the field, 4-13 from 3, and down six to the Pistons.
The game felt like it was going the way it was supposed to go. But then Baylor Scheierman checked in, hit a couple of shots, and made a hustle play kind of woke up the crowd.
It didn’t seem like much at the time, but fans at the Garden recognized the effort and hustle. They started to get up as the Celtics started to fight back.
With 4:50 to go in the first half, the Pistons looked to take some of that fight out of the Celtics. They’d just rebounded a miss by Sam Hauser, and they were on their way down the floor to start building a lead that most people probably expected them to keep. But as Jaden Ivey dribbled up the floor, ready to attack in transition, he made one big mistake.
He didn’t check his rearview mirror.
Derrick White turned on the jets, stripped Ivey from behind, spun, and found Josh Minott for an alley-oop.
“I think (those plays) changed the game,” Joe Mazzulla said after beating the Pistons. “And really this is a credit to the city and the Garden. We're 9-8 and haven't probably played as well as we wanted to have, but Baylor jumps on the floor for a loose ball, Derrick sprints back the full length of the floor and gets the back tip, and the entire energy in the Garden shifts, and I think the city, the Garden, appreciates - regardless of record or result - they just appreciate that type of mindset, that type of effort, and that's what we brought.”
The Celtics played their best game of the season on Wednesday night, but not because of their execution. It was because they never let up. They fought through early struggles and missed shots. After a loss to the Nets last Friday and a win over Orlando that felt like a loss because of the Magic comeback, the Celtics could have let their first-quarter misses feel like more of the same. Instead, they found a way to power through.
“It's awesome. We just got to find ways to maintain it,” Jaylen Brown said. “I love what I've seen from our guys. Our guys are developing and they're getting better and that's what we gotta be. We gotta be the harder-playing team. We gotta be physical, all of that type of stuff, and that's exactly what we saw tonight. If we get that more times than not, we'll be just fine.”
The Celtics and the Pistons have switched roles this year. Detroit came into this game riding high at the top of the standings and on a 13-game winning streak. The Celtics were 9-8 and still hearing the rumblings of whether packing it in and tanking is still a viable strategy. It’s weird to say this about a team with Jaylen Brown and Derrick White playing under a banner they hung two seasons ago, but they were the scrappy underdog.
“It's a new challenge for us, a new challenge for myself, but I'm embracing it,” Brown said. “I'm watching them develop and learn on the fly right in front of my eyes. So it's been great to see. I just encourage it to continue. And even though when we have some games like the Brooklyn game where we just completely just dropped a goose egg, did not play to our standard, just stay with it. It's going to be highs and lows. And tonight we come back and beat the number one team in the East. So it's going to be like that, but we just got to keep encouraging the growth that we're seeing and I'm excited about that.”
The Celtics rolled with Scheierman for almost the entire fourth quarter. Hugo Gonzalez played nearly half of it. Minott was the center for a long stretch … against the PISTONS!
No disrespect to Minott, but you could tape three of him together and still not get an entire Isaiah Stewart.
But it worked well enough to get the job done.
“It's funny, we went small. I felt like we protected the rim better than we did when we have bigs out there sometimes,” Mazzulla said. “Because I think the heightened awareness and kind of more of like, we don't have another choice. We have to do this.”
It’s hard to say if the Celtics discovered anything new in this win. Maybe Amari Williams will get a shot at some more minutes. Maybe the Celtics will try going smaller against big teams to try to recapture some of that mental desperation.
But one thing that has been true from the beginning was proven to be so again after this win.
Effort is a non-negotiable. Two games after Brown challenged his teammates to show to play or not to show up at all, the Celtics’ best effort of the season paid off in their best win. They are on a 45-win pace, which would be impressive for this misfit group trying to figure out how to play together.
Keep doing this, and the crowd will keep loving you for it.
“I think that's the challenge of the regular season,” Mazzulla said. “How many of the 82 can you be the best version of yourself, and then of the 48-minute games, how many of those minutes can you be at your best? And that's just a challenge, right?
“The guys have it in them. You can do it in training camp when there's no travel, there's no back-to-backs, the drill is only 10 minutes, it's not 48 minutes. There's so many variables once the season starts that test the discipline, the toughness and all the things that go into making the decision easy to have a great practice. We have to just fight to do that, and trust me, we're going to have more games like this, but we're going to have some where we don't play well. But over the course of 82, we just have to fight to be as consistent as we can in the best version of ourselves.”